A blog mostly about Russian literature and translation issues, as retailed by a small stuffed dinosaur.

Thursday, 3 April 2014

Don't Translate The War: Bulgakov in Kiev

From an email written by a friend's son in
February 2014:

‘In Kiev everything is very bad… I wasn’t even
allowed through with my passport and my pass… yesterday I came under fire on
Arsenalnaya; fighting broke out just as I was on my way home, stones and
grenades were flying, I hid myself with some other people behind a kiosk, and
made it home by running from shelter to shelter [перебежками].’

Here’s Nikolka Turbin in
December 1918:

‘Panting heavily and
feeling his legs weakening and giving way under him, Nikolka ran along the
empty Razyezhaya Street and made his way without incident as far as the
crossroads at the junction of two streets […]. By the side of a pillar he saw a
pool of blood and a pile of manure, together with two abandoned rifles and a
blue student’s cap. […] The crackle of machine-gun fire from the Upper City was
now constant.’

Modern reality and Mikhail Bulgakov's fiction dissolve into each other on the
strange, steep, seductive streets of Kiev, as civilization blurs into chaos
overnight and two young men, a century apart, flee sniper fire through the same
ancient capital city. Roger Cockrell’s definitive new
translation of Bulgakov’s The White
Guard (1925-9; Alma Classics, 2012) has appeared at a tragically apposite time for those who frame Ukraine’s current conflicts in the context of her even
more turbulent transition from Tsarist to Soviet imperial possession. The White Guard, Bulgakov’s first novel,
follows the Turbin family – elegant Elena, deserted by her callous, tergiversating
husband; dourly patriotic Alexei (the author’s alter ego); naïve Nikolka, and a
coterie of colourful neighbours and friends – through the bitter winter of
1918-19. They occupy the first floor of a townhouse modelled precisely on
Bulgakov’s own, down to the famous caricatures and doggerel inked on the tiles
of the Dutch stove and the well-loved volumes of Pushkin, Tolstoy and Nat
Pinkerton in the family library. Bulgakov hymns the middle-class luxuries of home, although clearly on the ebb, in contrast to
other, inimical cultural riptides: the Jew-hanging, cadet-shooting nationalist
army commanded by quasi-mythical Semyon Petlyura; the desperately decadent
nightlife of billetless officers and cash-rich refugees from Bolshevized
Moscow; the grief of the newly bereaved; and the sudden, senseless deaths of
loyalist Ukrainian forces, abandoned by their own high command as the latter
follows its government into exile.

Bulgakov in 1913

Bulgakov’s novel is confusing, winding,
structurally flawed (he later reworked the plot into Stalin’s favourite play, The Days of the Turbins). It is also
enticing, richly evocative, and in places maddeningly skilful (such as the
constant sub-audible dialogue with Tolstoy). I don’t mean the intentional echoing
of War and Peace; the resonances are subtler. A minor character – an archetypally
downright, inspiringly simple sergeant-major, not even a character proper as he
predeceases the narrative by two years – is named Zhilin after the similarly
ordinary hero of Tolstoy’s novella The
Prisoner of the Caucasus. This is typical intertextual finesse. On the other hand, Bulgakov’s lyrical
descriptions of the magical ‘City’, or melodramatic scenes like Elena’s
passionate bargaining with the Virgin Mary for her dying brother's life, are
beautifully written but feel forced; their intensity distracts. I prefer
more plebeian set pieces such as the burgling of Vasilisa (the Turbins’
avaricious downstairs neighbour) or the wonderful inanities of Lariosik, their
bumbling country cousin who turns up in the middle of the civil war with a
canary and a sheaf of currency, and falls quietly and immediately in love with
Elena. Lariosik’s mini-Bildungsroman unfolds in the second half of the book,
unfairly but perfectly concealed behind the storylines of other family members.

This new translation goes
further than the previous versions by Michael Glenny (1971) and Marion Schwartz
(2008), and succeeds better than either. Cockrell’s version is more rigorously
authentic than Glenny’s very good translation, even where accuracy challenges
the capacity of the language. To give just one example, he is the first
translator to find an English equivalent for Colonel Nai-Turs’s distinctive
Serbian accent. For Schwarz, Nai-Turs is simply the 'burring, laconic colonel' (p. 146). Glenny ducks the issue, thus ignoring Bulgakov’s comic
portrayal of this otherwise repressively gloomy character. When Cockrell’s
Nai-Turs is forcing a senior officer at gunpoint to release footwear for his
men, he says, ‘You pick up phone, you sirry old man, and my gun shoot you in
head… Then you rie on froor.’ Even dying in front of terrified Nikolka,
Nai-Turs is laughable: ‘Don’t be so damned heloic’ are among his last words.

Cockrell also pulls off the
novel’s difficult introduction (original here); this is one of several places where Bulgakov’s
deliberately elegiac style, keyed to the Book of Revelations, teeters
constantly on the verge of tendentiousness. Translators can easily fall over
the edge. Here’s Cockrell: ‘Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918,
the second year after the revolution. The summer was abundant with sun and the
winter with snow, and two stars stood especially high in the sky: the
shepherds’ star – the evening Venus – and red, quivering Mars. […] that very same
week the white coffin containing the body of [the Turbins’] mother had been
carried down the steep St Alexei’s Hill to the little church of St Nicholas the
Good in Podol, on the Embankment’. Glenny tumbles off the cliff, or rather, the
embankment: ‘Great and terrible was the year of Our Lord 1918, of the
Revolution the second. Its summer abundant with warmth and sun, its winter with
snow, highest in its heaven stood two stars: the shepherds’ star, eventide
Venus; and Mars, quivering, red. […] the white coffin with the body of their
mother was carried away down the slope of St Alexei’s Hill towards the
Embankment, to the little church of the [sic] St Nicholas the Good’. Schwartz is oratorical: 'Great was the year and terrible was the Year of Our Lord 1918, the second since the Revolution has begun. Sun had been abundant in the summer, snow in the winter, and two stars had risen particularly high in the sky: Venus, the Evening Star; and Mars, red and quivering. [...] a white coffin with his mother's body was carried down steep Alexeyevsky Slope toward Podol and the little church of St Nicholas the Good, on the Embankment'. Here as throughout the novel, Cockrell restrains Bulgakov's rhetoric whenever it becomes incompatible with English literary prose, without sacrificing accuracy. Such skilled compromises more than justify his new translation.

‘I will be terribly sorry
if I’m mistaken and if The White Guard
is not an exceptional piece’, Bulgakov, modest as ever, confided to his diary
on January 5, 1925. Mikhail Bulgakov:
Diaries and Selected Letters (Alma Classics, 2013) is the latest of
Cockrell’s Bulgakov translations (which include The Fatal Eggs, also for Alma). It is beautifully presented
(every page headed by the year of composition, making navigation easier) and
thoroughly endnoted, as is The White Guard. As a cold-blooded reader, I
prefer footnotes (endnotes force you to break the flow of concentration by
flicking to the end, or else they generate guilty guesswork if you refrain and
read on). Their sheer plenitude in this edition is distracting. Two other
immediately striking points about the presentation reflect the unstable status
of translation in the UK: Diaries and Selected
Letters was subsidized by the Arts Council, a sobering reminder that
literary translation is a niche, unsustainable activity; and the disappointing
absence of the translator’s name from the front or back covers (it is
sequestered, instead, on the flyleaf).

Unlike The
White Guard, however, this volume begs
an existential question: was there any need to replace Julie Curtis’
groundbreaking translation of largely identical material, Manuscripts Don’t Burn: A Life in Letters
and Diaries (Bloomsbury, 1991)? Moreover, Curtis’ translations were made at
a time when the goodwill of Bulgakov’s widow (the apparently adipose Lyubov’
Evgenyevna – see below) was required to obtain original documents, not
forgetting the goodwill of an intimidating network of Soviet scholars. Manuscripts Don’t Burn remains a more important scholarly resource,
primarily because it provides fuller historical context by including letters
from Bulgakov’s family and acquaintances(and helpfully prefaces each chronological section with a characterful
commentary). Curtis’s collection, however, achieves its range by omitting or
editing sections of Bulgakov’s own correspondence. These are restored in
Cockrell’s new translation, which excludes all voices except Bulgakov’s own.
The writer emerges through his own words: bitter, observant, whimsical, flippant,
conceited, bizarrely unjust to his first wife (he asked her not to acknowledge
him if she ever saw him in the street with another woman; she apparently consented),
extravagantly uxorious toward his third.

Bulgakov and poklonnitsa [female admirer]

Curtis’s and Cockrell’s books
complement, rather than replace, each other; moreover, Cockrell is probably the better stylist, reproducing
Bulgakov’s suave yet idiosyncratic flow in absorbingly natural English. But because
he is less literal than Curtis, he is also, in places, less strictly accurate. This
sample comparison demonstrates both Cockrell’ssmoother style (and tact, in his choice of adjective for Bulgakov’s
wife), and his slightly misleading version of the phrase ‘унижаюсь даже до легкой ревности’. Here's the original (and my deliberately 'straight'
translation):

A dreadful state of affairs: I'm falling more and
more in love with my wife. It's offensive - for 10 years I've been swearing off
my... Women are women. And now I'll even humiliate myself to the point of
feeling slightly jealous. There's something nice and sweet about her. And
plump. I didn't read any newspapers today.

Julie Curtis:

I'm in a dreadful state: I'm falling more and more
in love with my wife. It's so infuriating: for ten years I've refused to have
anything to do with... Women are just women. And now I am demeaning myself to
the extent even of slight jealousy. Somehow she's very dear to me and sweet.
And fat. [last line omitted from translation]

Roger Cockrell:

I'm in a terrible state: I'm falling more and more
in love with my wife. How annoying: for the last ten years I've kept on turning
away from anyone close to me... a woman is just a woman, after all. But now I
allow myself to be humiliated by even the slightest twinge of jealousy. She's
sweet and lovely. And large. Didn't read the newspapers today.

Lyubov' Evgenyevna, Bulgakov's second wife. Large? Fat? Or just plump?

Comparisons like these may
seem petty, but they highlight the importance (and elusiveness) of total
accuracy in non-fictional translation. Nuance is crucial when so much of
Bulgakov’s prose, already involuted, had to be guarded and self-censored. The
watershed moment in Bulgakov's diary comes in spring 1926, when an infamous
OGPU raid on his flat confiscated both the manuscript of Heart of a Dog and the author's
diaries. Understandably, Bulgakov never wrote another diary
entry. Cockrell continues the story with Bulgakov's letters, his OGPU
interrogation statement of September 1926 ('I love the intelligentsia and
consider it a weak but nevertheless very important social group in the country.
The fates of its members are close to my own, and their experiences are dear to
me'), and the famous letters sent in 1930 and 1931 respectively to the
'Government of the USSR' and to Stalin. It remains extraordinary that Bulgakov
said what he did as publicly as he did; it is astonishing that even The White Guard, published (with
cuts) in the Soviet Union in 1925, honestly reflected Bulgakov’s contempt for
the Bolsheviks and sympathy with the Turbins’ class (which was, of course, his
own).

Bulgakov in 1928

He pulled off political blasphemy by historicizing it: The White Guard can be anti-Bolshevik because its characters,
and their milieu, are understood to already be as extinct as, well, me. Perhaps because his novels and plays are so successful at showing the real man, Bulgakov’s
diaries and letters disappoint, for all their charm. Their glittering brevity affords only glimpses of Bulgakov: the writer's truth shines through his fiction.

Disclaimers: Julie Curtis is a personal friend. Roger Cockrell has previously written kind reviews of my work. Many thanks to Alma Classics for sending me review copies of both books, and to YK for sharing her son's message with me. RD

4 comments:

Thanks for this post, Russian Dinosaur! I've just started Белая гвардия so it's interesting to read your take on the novel and its translations. The text feels very dense, perhaps because its starts off with the references to the Book of Revelations, along with all those measures of time... in any case, I'm enjoying sorting through things and taking my time. (I've tried many times over the years to read White Guard and only now, on what must be at least the tenth attempt, did it hit me right. I failed with the play version many times, too, an even more egregious omission from my reading because it was on my grad school reading list!)

The oddest thing is that books like this that I "save up" are often the ones I end up enjoying and respecting the most. We'll see how this one fares! The enjoyment certainly isn't the same type as from Master and Margarita or Heart of a Dog but I think that makes me appreciate White Guard--and Bulgakov--all the more.

Dinosaur bones

I am a small, brightly coloured dinosaur who has visited many of the world's great research libraries, including the National Library of Russia in St Petersburg (my profile picture shows me posing with one of its most famous readers). I like reading all sorts of books, although my academic specialization is Russian. I read, study, translate, and occasionally teach Russian literature.